Poetry! New PaltzHigh School

Syllabus

Instructor: Lisa St. John

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

–Percy Bysshe Shelley

Welcome to this exciting ten-week course. We will explore different poets, poetic forms and movements from 1600 to the present. Here are the essential questions we will focus on:

  • Why read poetry? Why write poetry?
  • What does poetry say that prose does not say?
  • How has poetry affected society (society—poetry?)

Here are the skills we are going to master:

  • Comprehension, analysis, application, synthesis of how to explicate and analyze poetry
  • Comprehension, application, analysis of thematic elements and how they are created
  • Analysis of essential questions
  • Comprehension of the history of western poetry

On the second page of this syllabus is a course outline. However, much of what we accomplish together will depend on your particular skills and interests. The outline is a framework. Reading aloud and class discussion are key elements for success in this pass/fail course. Fear not! We will practice together. You will also write analyses, reactions, and poems. It’s all about learning (discovering).

“You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.”

--Joseph Joubert

WEEK ONE: Enlightenment/Metaphysical (1600--1790) Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Marvell / WEEK SIX:
Postwar (1940’s—1970’s) Roethke, Bishop, Brooks, Wilbur, Ginsberg, Sexton, Rich, Plath
WEEK TWO:
Romanticism (1783—1830) Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge / WEEK SEVEN:
Contemporary (1970’s--) Pinsky, Simic, Gluck, Dove, Bukowski
WEEK THREE:
Victorian (1800’s)Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hopkins / WEEK EIGHT:
Spoken Word (1990’s--) Marc Kelly Smith, Saul Williams, Audre Lourde, Big Poppa E(Eirik Ott), Jeffrey McDaniel
WEEK FOUR:
American Renaissance (1830’s—1912)
Whitman, Dickinson, Robinson, Crane / WEEK NINE:
Continue Spoken Word (1990’s--) Marc Kelly Smith, Saul Williams, Audre Lourde, Big Poppa E (Eirik Ott), Jeffrey McDaniel
WEEK FIVE:
Modernism (1900s—1940’s) Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Moore, Cummings, Hughes / WEEK TEN:
Poetry performance

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. --Plato

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

--William Hazlitt

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

--Keats

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”

--Pablo Neruda

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.”

--Juan Ramon Jimenez

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.”

--Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were”

--John Donne